The Lives of the Wicked Should Be
by LesMisLoony
Summary: [Sweeney Todd] Had Sweeney’s evil been so powerful that it had not died with him? Anthony muses at the barber's grave and finds something startling. A crossover of sorts, and kudos to those who know what with.


Something about the barber's grave made Anthony come back again and again. It was unmarked but for a wild rosebush, a mass grave full of the bones of paupers. The women were in there, too. They hadn't been able to untwist Sweeney's arms from the corpse of the beggar woman, so they'd thrown them in together. Mrs. Lovett had been right behind.

The Judge and the Beadle were buried in the cemetery by the church. They were good men who had died unjustly. But no one visited their graves.

Anthony often sat by the little rosebush, crossed his long legs, and thought. He imagined that he held all the pieces of the puzzle in his hands, but they were arranged in the wrong order. Nothing fit together. There had to be more to the story. He came here to be away from the bustle of his life. He came here to think. For surely a spirit as strong as Sweeney Todd had not just allowed himself to be murdered by a madman.

Or had he been mad himself?

Anthony was thinking somberly on the scene he had walked into that day when he noticed a short, thick stalk in the vibrant grass of the grave. He leaned closer to the strange plant.

It was small, a yellowish shade of green, and almost as round as his little finger, curled at the top. A plant whose roots fed on the soil enriched by death.

It was a morbid thought, to say the least.

Anthony had noticed that his thoughts had turned darker in recent days. Of course he was happy at home, with Johanna. She was everything he had hoped she would be. He loved her.

Yet he kept coming back here.

Perhaps he was grateful to Sweeney Todd, for without the mad barber's help he and Johanna could never had found each other. And, he couldn't forget, when Johanna had insisted he find a job in London Sweeney's brief teachings had qualified him to take temporary work in a wigmaker's shop. But even these things hardly added up to make them even, for Anthony had saved Sweeney Todd's life. The poor man had barely survived a shipwreck off the coast of Australia, and Anthony had seen him thrashing in the foaming ocean late that night—

For the first time he wondered if that story was even true.

In a matter of days the strange plant had grown taller and thicker. Within a few weeks the top of the stem uncurled, revealing a heavy bud. Two leaves sprouted from the stem, positioned like shrugging shoulders beneath the pod. Anthony patiently noted the plant's progress each time he returned to the old grave.

He had been there when the corpses, wrapped in white sheets, had been unceremoniously dumped into the hole. One sheet had been stretched to cover both Sweeney Todd and the madwoman, but when their bundle fell atop the pile of vagrant cadavers the seam on one side split, and Sweeney's frightening head lolled out into daylight for the last time. Johanna had shrieked and buried her face in his shoulder, her tousled yellow hair tickling his neck, and Anthony had wrapped his arms around her, unable to tear his own eyes from the gruesome sight.

The barber's greying hair was matted with his own dried blood. No one had bothered to bandage the bleeding throat of a slain murderer, and rivulets of dried brown blood ran up from his neck, rolling past his ears and through his scalp. Had they carried the body upside down? Blood had rolled upward from his gaping mouth, too, and his cold grey eyes fixed a maddeningly lifeless gaze on the empty sky above.

They had thrown the last sack, the one that contained Mrs. Lovett, into the grave and began to drop in the dirt. Mrs. Lovett slipped off to the side, leaving Sweeney to stare eternally upward. Anthony still could not look away as the dirt trickled down and filled his mouth, then covered his open eyes.

And now his own eyes drifted thoughtlessly to the spot, a few feet to his left, where the head had been, and he started to see that the strange plant was growing from this exact place. The bud was beginning to open to reveal a large, round pod with a yellowish pucker framing a seam that ran across the middle. An image formed in his mind of the barber's face, rotting beneath the earth, the roots of this plant twisting around his skull and into the eye sockets and open mouth. He shook his head and drew a finger across the seam, surprised by how firm the pod seemed to be. He had seen plants something like this that ate insects, but they were certainly not native to London. Perhaps it had been planted here?

And then an idea struck him. What if it _had_ been planted on the grave? That meant that someone else in London knew Sweeney Todd, or Mrs. Lovett, or even the old woman. That meant that someone out there could fill in the gaps in the story.

But no one else knew where Sweeney had been buried except the gravediggers themselves.

Perhaps Anthony had discovered a new species of plant. How fitting that this carnivore had grown up from the grave of such a dangerous man.

And then his thoughts began to move wildly, drawing conclusions Anthony could never have dreamed of, as though something had planted them in his head. There was substantial evidence uncovered in the old barbershop and bakery to conclude that Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett had been working together for some time now. Bits of human bone and been found in the oven, a few melted brass buttons, and, most obviously, the bloody chute from the barber chair to the kitchen. A genius invention, but a terrifying one. Sweeney Todd had always struck Anthony as a strange man, and somehow the idea that he had been a murderer had complete sense. And the cannibalism had not been too hard to accept either.

Now here, growing on the old murderer's grave, was a plant that killed. Insects, of course, were hardly as macabre a target as humans, but the parallels were irresistible. Had Sweeney's evil been so powerful that it had not died with him, but had taken root and grown into a strange, bloodthirsty, and hitherto undiscovered plant?

The idea was preposterous, but somehow appealing.

Anthony absently reached toward the stunted wild rosebush and plucked a few of its blooms, thinking vaguely to arrange them around the strange plant as a little tribute to the unrecognized souls below. His groping fingers closed over a thorn, and he jerked his hand away with a grunt.

As he was watching the perfect drop of crimson blood form at the tip of his pointer finger, Anthony became aware of a rustling sound coming from behind him.

Warily, he turned to find its source.

The pod of the strange plant had opened like a thirsty mouth, and it was stretching toward him, snapping closed and then yawning open again.

It was stretching toward his bleeding hand like a hungry animal.

Anthony got to his feet and fled.


End file.
